Vietnamese alphabet
It uses the Latin script based on Romance languages[6] originally developed by Francisco de Pina (1585–1625), a missionary from Portugal.
[7] The Vietnamese system's use of diacritics produces an accurate transcription for tones despite the limitations of the Roman alphabet.
[a] In southern speech, the phoneme /r/, generally represented in Vietnamese linguistics by the letter ⟨r⟩, has a number of variant pronunciations.
This is because the orthography was designed centuries ago and the spoken language has changed, as shown in the chart directly above that contrasts the difference between Middle and Modern Vietnamese.
There have been attempts since the late 20th century to standardize the orthography by replacing ⟨y⟩ with ⟨i⟩ when it represents a vowel, the latest being a decision from the Vietnamese Ministry of Education in 1984.
In textbooks published by Nhà Xuất bản Giáo dục ('Publishing House of Education'), ⟨y⟩ is used to represent /i/ only in Sino-Vietnamese words that are written with one letter ⟨y⟩ alone (diacritics can still be added, as in ⟨ý⟩, ⟨ỷ⟩), at the beginning of a syllable when followed by ⟨ê⟩ (as in yếm, yết), after ⟨u⟩ and in the sequence ⟨ay⟩; therefore such forms as *lý and *kỹ are not "standard", though they are much preferred elsewhere.
[citation needed] The uses of ⟨i⟩ and ⟨y⟩ to represent the phoneme /i/ can be categorized as "standard" (as used in textbooks published by Nhà Xuất bản Giáo dục) and "non-standard" as follows.
The table below matches the vowels of Hanoi Vietnamese (written in the IPA) and their respective orthographic symbols used in the writing system.
While the "old style" emphasizes aesthetics by placing the tone mark as close as possible to the center of the word (by placing the tone mark on the last vowel if an ending consonant part exists and on the next-to-last vowel if the ending consonant does not exist, as in hóa, hủy), the "new style" emphasizes linguistic principles and tries to apply the tone mark on the main vowel (as in hoá, huỷ).
In both styles, when one vowel already has a quality diacritic on it, the tone mark must be applied to it as well, regardless of where it appears in the syllable (thus thuế is acceptable while *thúê is not).
A written syllable consists of at most three parts, in the following order from left to right: Since the beginning of the Chinese rule 111 BC, literature, government papers, scholarly works, and religious scripture were all written in classical Chinese (漢文 Hán văn) while indigenous writing with chữ Hán started around the ninth century.
[25] The Latin alphabet then became a means to publish Vietnamese popular literature, which was disparaged as vulgar by the Chinese-educated imperial elites.
[26] Historian Pamela A. Pears asserted that by instituting the Latin alphabet in Vietnam, the French cut the Vietnamese from their traditional Hán Nôm literature.
[28] According to the historian Liam Kelley in his 2016 work "Emperor Thành Thái’s Educational Revolution" neither the French nor the revolutionaries had enough power to spread the usage of chữ Quốc ngữ down to the village level.
[28] It was by imperial decree in 1906 of Emperor Thành Thái, that parents could decide whether their children will follow a curriculum in Hán văn (漢文) or Nam âm (南音, 'Southern sound', the contemporary Vietnamese name for chữ Quốc ngữ).
[28] This decree was issued at the same time when other social changes, such as the cutting of long male hair, were occurring.
[28] From the first days it was recognized that the Chinese language was a barrier between us and the natives; the education provided by means of the hieroglyphic characters was completely beyond us; this writing makes possible only with difficulty transmitting to the population the diverse ideas which are necessary for them at the level of their new political and commercial situation.
Consequently we are obliged to follow the traditions of our own system of education; it is the only one which can bring close to us the Annamites of the colony by inculcating in them the principles of European civilization and isolating them from the hostile influence of our neighbors.
[30] Between 1907 and 1908, the short-lived Tonkin Free School promulgated chữ Quốc ngữ and taught French language to the general population.
Hundreds of thousands of textbooks for primary education began to be published in chữ Quốc ngữ, with the unintentional result of turning the script into the popular medium for the expression for Vietnamese culture.
The universal character set Unicode has full support for the Latin Vietnamese writing system, although it does not have a separate segment for it.
An ASCII-based writing convention, Vietnamese Quoted Readable and several byte-based encodings including VSCII (TCVN), VNI, VISCII and Windows-1258 were widely used before Unicode became popular.
Most keyboards on modern phone and computer operating systems, including iOS,[35] Android[36] and MacOS,[37] have now supported the Vietnamese language and direct input of diacritics by default.
